Dear Readers,
It’s an overcast Monday summer afternoon – thank God – and we’ve got a bumper newsletter for you today. Owing to Brexit-related delays at the border, Issue 12 has been delayed by a week, and will be with us on Friday. What this means is that our Very Special Deal continues for another few days, so if you subscribe right now, then you’ll receive Issue 11 on Wednesday, and Issue 12 just a few days later, and three further magazines after that: one extra issue for the year, all for the cost-of-living-crisis-proof of £25 for the year.
We feel a bit overcooked on political gossip, so today, the lead piece is a confessional piece from the nether regions of fashion regions from Jude Whiley-Morton.
What is This? A School for Ants?
I became a model back in 2015, working for a pocket of small designers before reaching the ‘climax’ of my career modelling for Burberry. I say climax; I mean anti-climax – Burberry cut me from the campaign after we finished shooting. This isn’t rare (or even that sad) but the knock to my confidence proved fatal; my enthusiasm dwindled, until I was eventually dropped by my agency sometime in 2020.
Flopping as a model hurt me so keenly because, on paper, I was a shoe-in. If I were to have succeeded as a model, I would have been your Model T, cut-and-paste, flatpack McModel: 6ft 2in, privately educated and with parents working in the entertainment industries. But both success and failure require inhabiting a world wrought with abasement, sabotage and exploitation – you really cannot win, no matter which way things shake out for you. I was shielded from the worst of it, but even in my short spell in the industry, the stories I heard and the people I encountered were more than enough of a warning. What follows is the advice of a cosseted but self-confessed modelling failure.
First things first: in modelling as in Buddhism, suffering is the rule. From the relatively small discomfort of constant rejection, to life-shaking abuse facilitated by the industry, models in all areas suffer to some degree, some of the time. They live according to two dichotomous ideas: the first is that they must look unique; the second is they must be typical. This cognitive dissonance is what produces strange behaviour in models, what makes them objects of fascination and subjects of parody.
Like others, I was seduced by my agency, in-part due to their hailing me a beautiful, rare butterfly that casting agents could not resist. For a 17-year-old at the dawn of an identity crisis, modelling seemed like it might have the potential to turn traits for which I had been teased at school into positive features: my thin body, my facial structure and my femininity were now appealing.
One of the first dissociative events of my career happened when I arrived at a casting to find a hundred guys absolutely identical to myself queued down the road, all thin and blonde, looking like those automaton mops from Disney’s Fantasia. I just couldn’t understand why one willowy teen with an undiagnosed autoimmune disease won work over another.
When models reach this realisation – that to be successful might be, in fact, hard – their behaviour alters. They become what can only be defined as a Zoolander: farcical, desperate, pretentious. On one shoot, there was a model who turned up to his 4am call time in a leather Ali G tracksuit which he could only enter with the help of talcum powder, wearing a jewellery set made from dismembered dolls. At a Vivienne Westwood casting, I met a model who, having seen my Instagram (which features pictures of myself in drag), recommended I change my pronouns to secure more work. Having identified the industry’s fetishization of diversity, this model was planning on ways to profit. 'Work pronouns' were, to them, not an affront to trans and non-binary folk, but a common-sense business decision – this is how modelling can warp the mind.
Since the pool of wannabe models is so large while available work is so slim, this sort of abasement is, for most, an inevitability. And while some willingly do this to secure work, others find themselves in situations where keeping a job is dependent on agreeing to wild editorial decisions. Sometimes these are funny: like the time I found my hair being permed for a look described by one assistant as ‘McEnroe-chic’. Other times, models find themselves in looks which are outright racist, such as Gucci’s blackface turtleneck. Saying yes can mean wearing these controversies for the rest of your career, but saying no can be far more damaging to one’s name.
Of course, not every model is humiliated to this degree. Some are spared because their parents are famous. For one, it’s my belief that I only landed the campaign with Burberry because of my famous mother: I’d modelled just a few times before Christopher Bailey hired me. If another model had walked in with the portfolio I had brought, minus the name, Burberry could not have taken the risk. But Burberry has a history of hiring the children of famous people: Iris Law, Lizzy Jagger, Dylan Brosnan, so on and so forth. After seeing his elephant photography, would you ever consider hiring Brooklyn Beckham to shoot your campaign? Burberry did.
But even in an industry where you are the product, the end of modelling doesn’t have to mean the end of you. While modelling, I based my self-worth on my appearance. For a teen whose body was constantly changing, this led to problems which still trouble me today. After I quit modelling, I began writing; a masochist’s move to leave one industry built on constant rejection for another. But the difference is, anything which you might pursue for the love of the thing itself is easier on the mind than modelling. The drive to improve your work is not compounded with the sense of helplessness inherent in modelling, that your 'work', your body, is fundamentally unchangeable. My advice as a failed model? Find a fallback of which you are proud, one where failure does not fundamentally alter your sense of self. Your therapist will thank you.
You should follow Jude on his Instagram here
Brown Trousers
We have been told that a senior Daily Mail journalist was ambling around a south London pub this weekend, which is hardly a scoop in itself, but said journalist was talking to fellow patrons oblivious to the fact – judging by the evidence on their pale trousers – that they had soiled themselves.
Straight Up Like a Vertical Firecracker
Boris Johnson celebrated the endtimes of his premiership with a flight in a Typhoon jet flight at RAF Coningsby, before giving a rambling speech, where he quoted John Gillespie Magee’s poem High Flight. In an unintentionally apt metaphor for Johnson’s premiership, Magee died in 1941, in an accidental mid-air collision just twenty miles from RAF Coningsby – the 19-year-old airman was buried in the village of Scopwick.
Spice Up Your Life
Every commissioning editor, staff writer and freelance journalist should watch this BBC documentary available on iPlayer – Who Stole Tamara Ecclestone’s Diamonds. It’s a sterling work of investigative digging, firstly, but it’s also produced with a welcome helping of frivolity, matching a thrilling hunt for jewels with pounding dance music and a steer away from self-seriousness. And truth be told, there’s a lesson to be learned from this sort of storytelling. Broadsheet print journalism in this country can often feel like a fiddly, humourless facsimile of the longform work produced across the Atlantic, with stories edited with too keen an eye trained on Twitter’s response. This programme, which was edited and directed by Ben Bryant (who, rather interestingly, started out as a freelance features writer at the Evening Standard) shows that another way is possible – let’s bring back that tabloid sensibility.
The Margaret Thatcher of Haute Cuisine
That is the accolade that was given to Clare Smyth by Gordon Ramsay. The chef-patron of Core, in Notting Hill, Smyth is the first British woman to win three Michelin stars. And now her cookbook is here, which was written in collaboration by our own very estimable deputy editor, Kieran Morris. Published with Phaidon, the book has 60 key recipes from Core’s kitchen plus 70 other ones for everyday eating. You can buy a copy from Waterstone’s at this link – and follow the prolific and terrifyingly young Kieran (he’s just turned 26!) on Twitter here.
In Case You Missed it
Give the people what they want! It’s a surprisingly deep encounter between the world’s two favourite Brians Cox
Why are British homes so hot and what has it to do with Victorian women’s nipples? – Phineas Harper investigates.
Josh Dzieza talks to the authors using AI to write their novels in this engrossing, and mildly disturbing dispatch from the future, for The Verge
Jeremy Markovich gets to the bottom of one of the lowest-stakes mysteries imaginable in this charming investigation into the provenance of a Spielberg baseball cap.
And Finally
A tribute, this week, to this wonderful short documentary on the linguistic impact of Polari; the tightly-guarded carnival creole adopted by Britain’s gay community. Gleefully snatching terms from Romani languages, Cockney rhyming slang, theatrical jargon and wordplay, polari functioned as a secret code that allowed gay people to converse freely and joyfully at a time when their very being was criminalised. To the uninitiated, it was inscrutable – or at the very least, far more innocent-sounding on the ear than intended.
Take, for instance, the popular 50s radio show Round The Horne, which introduced the nation to Kenneth Williams, and to the verbal tricks of Polari: under the cover of performing as one half of ‘Julian & Sandy’, Williams could delight and entertain with his inimitable brand of high camp (itself a Polari term) while also telling impossibly dirty jokes that could bypass polite society and enthral those in the know. Polari’s popularity faded after the decriminalisation of homosexuality, but its charm and impact persists; we have Polari to thank for camp, khazi, blag, scarper, zhoosh, mince, and naff – which was either an acronym or backronym for ‘not available for fucking’.
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That’s it for this week, and next time we join you, Issue 12 will be in your hands, which really is very exciting for everyone concerned, and there’s going to be a carnival of content (!) starting at the end of this week. Remember: that five-for-four deal is going to breathe its last on Thursday, so do swoop in at the link below.
As ever, you can email us with any thoughts, tips and queries. But we’re very keen on tips in particular. Until next Monday.
All the best,
TF
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